Continuation Part 14: Amanda Knox/Raffaele Sollecito

[carbonjam72]

And yet based on your response there must have been some, and major ones at that.

Honestly P, as with this very post I'm responding to, I still have no idea WTF you're talking about.

If you would speak straight and not in riddles, it might be possible to converse.

Your reference to "killers walking free", I think that's the first specific definitive statement I've ever seen from you as to guilt or innocence for Amanda & Raf.

So that's progress I suppose. What you haven't provided, nor am I anticipating you will, is any reason, rationale or evidence of any kind whatsoever to support that position.

But I give you a lot of credit for showing up and trading a few posts. You know, none of the other pro-guilt people have come back.

I'm heartbroken we seem to have lost Mach. Who else can explain the latest developments?

 

[acbytesla]

Well, now that Britney is completely innocent she has the option of using the civil courts to seek redress for this stain on her character.

I suspect she will have many such opportunities, whether she avails of then remains to be seen.
I doubt it somehow.

I doubt it too, but for a reason that I doubt you will comprehend . She will want to move on and unlike in Italy defamation suits are very rarely filed.. (plaintiffs almost never win them here because the standards of proof . Also Amanda is considered a "public person" therefore, she would also have to not only prove that these people maligned her but they did it with malice. So, while I think that she could prove that they were wrong, she would have a difficult time proving the malice.

 

[Sonia]

As Numbers pointed out, and my understanding too, is that PAtrick was awarded $8,000 euros from the police, but declined to accept it, and instead took his case to ECHR thinking he could get more money there.

I think he declined to accept the offer of comp, he said he didn't blame the police.

I'm not sure what angle of comp he preferred to follow.

But I believe he got paid $100,000 euros from a tabloid, IIRC?? Can that possibly be true?

Also, he claimed he was misquoted in the tabloid, and toned done his position when testifying at trial.

Lumumba is a bit of a scuz-bucket, imo. Yes he was harassed by cops, and the loss of his bar and livelihood, is a great reason for 'naming, names'. Doesn't mean its right.

And embracing his better nature at this point, means he has to stop riding the the Amanda Knox gravy train.

Plus he's an artist actually, a musician. So he's half mad out of the gate. He's probably got everything so bolloxed up in his head by now, stewing with jealousy over Knox's "celebrity and wealth" (his words), I doubt he;ll ever be able to disentangle things.

It's too bad. he was probably a gentle man before he got kidnapped by Mignini's henchmen.

Lumumba was reportedly paid 70,000 Euros for selling his story to the group that owns the Daily Mail and various other tabloids. That number is not out of line with the kind of cash that the DM pays for big tabloid stories.

He later denied lots of things that Antonio Hoyle of the DM reported him as saying in that interview published November 25, 2007. The DM uses a lot of creative license with its stories. They want to get their money's worth when they pay a lot.

 

[carbonjam72]

We don't have sororities or fraternities. It would be considered seriously uncool to belong to one if they existed. Oxford, Cambridge and Durham have colleges, but they are parts of the university.

Hold the phone! That's news to me. I feel a bit let down actually.

Ok, does anyone know what relationship if any Selene has to I believe ms Hathaway? Or, other wise explain her devotion to writing those goofy guilter articles? She still doesn't compute for me, but none of the guilters do, I confess.

 

[Numbers]

btw, just saw an interview with Nina Burleigh on MSNBC I think, and she mentioned the trial file of Rudy Guede is still under seal for no explainable reason.

Nina suggested that journalists in Italy could help the Kerchers to understand the truth by demanding that the case file be unsealed and the information from Rudy's trial be accessible to journalists to report on.

Shows you what a phoney cover-up this case has been from the beginning. Seems like the dam is cracking, and now the truth will finally come out, and all the crawlies under the rock will be expose to the light of day.

That would be justice for Meredith.

If the Kerchers lodged a claim against Italy with the ECHR for a violation of their, and Meredith's, rights under Article 2 of the Convention, for not conducting an effective investigation of a death, they would get to see the records of Guede's trials and interviews with police and prosecutors.

Note that Guede was not, insofar as known, subjected to the kind of high-pressure interrogation used on Amanda and Raffaele.

 

[LondonJohn]

Lumumba was reportedly paid 70,000 Euros for selling his story to the group that owns the Daily Mail and various other tabloids. That number is not out of line with the kind of cash that the DM pays for big tabloid stories.

He later denied lots of things that Antonio Hoyle of the DM reported him as saying in that interview published November 25, 2007. The DM uses a lot of creative license with its stories. They want to get their money's worth when they pay a lot.

The DMGT (the parent company of the Daily Mail and its Sunday sister paper the Mail on Sunday) only owns and publishes those two national titles. It doesn't own/publish any other national tabloids - it's only other significant newspaper interest in the UK is Metro, a daily London freesheet.

Regarding the Lumumba interview, I've argued before that I think it is highly unlikely (to the point of near-impossibility) that the Mail would have published directly-attributed quotes within quotation marks made by Lumumba unless it was certain that Lumumba did indeed say those things (i.e. their exact Italian or French equivalent - depending on the language in which he conducted the interview).

I say that because a) they are directly-attributed quotes within quotation marks, and even UK tabloid newspapers are simply not in the business of making up direct quotes of this nature; and b) the very nature of the accusations contained within those quotes makes it additionally important that the quotes could be verified as accurate and reliable.

I very strongly suspect that the interview with Lumumba was tape recorded, and that the newspaper's lawyers insisted on listening to the tapes and reading the translated transcripts before allowing this story to run. Can you imagine the Mail's potential exposure if Lumumba had never provably said those things? Even the Mail is nowhere near that stupid. They could have faced serious defamation suits by either Lumumba, the Perugia police, or both.

I therefore think it's wholly reasonable to conclude that Lumumba almost certainly did make exactly those accusations in exactly those words in his oral interview with the Mail. I also suspect that either Lumumba's lawyer or the police or the PM in the case got onto Lumumba very quickly after the story went live. And I think that whoever intervened, and whatever was said in that intervention, Lumumba quickly and easily became convinced that it was strongly in his own best interests to publicly renounce those quoted accusations.

 

[carbonjam72]

I doubt it too, but for a reason that I doubt you will comprehend . She will want to move on and unlike in Italy defamation suits are very rarely filed.. (plaintiffs almost never win them here because the standards of proof . Also Amanda is considered a "public person" therefore, she would also have to not only prove that these people maligned her but they did it with malice. So, while I think that she could prove that they were wrong, she would have a difficult time proving the malice.

Anglo or other lawyers would know better, but I think Amanda would have a much stronger case in the UK for a slander claim.

But I agree that I doubt either Amanda or Raf wants to spend any more time in a courtroom. I think the novelty has worn off.

 

[carbonjam72]

Lumumba was reportedly paid 70,000 Euros for selling his story to the group that owns the Daily Mail and various other tabloids. That number is not out of line with the kind of cash that the DM pays for big tabloid stories.

He later denied lots of things that Antonio Hoyle of the DM reported him as saying in that interview published November 25, 2007. The DM uses a lot of creative license with its stories. They want to get their money's worth when they pay a lot.

Yes, that jogs my memory, I think that's what I saw. and that number I believe was reported as $100,000 US dollars, so that's where I got that number from. Thanks Sonia!

 

[carbonjam72]

If the Kerchers lodged a claim against Italy with the ECHR for a violation of their, and Meredith's, rights under Article 2 of the Convention, for not conducting an effective investigation of a death, they would get to see the records of Guede's trials and interviews with police and prosecutors.

Note that Guede was not, insofar as known, subjected to the kind of high-pressure interrogation used on Amanda and Raffaele.

Seems to me that people here have been asking about Guede's initial interviews when he got back from Germany in December of 2007. I'll bet that's in the file and he starts out by saying what he said in the skype interview; "Amanda wasn't there", and, "Raf who?".

 

[LondonJohn]

Selene is rather special. Samson has suggested she was a friend of one of Meredith's British friends (I had heard she was a sorority sister).

Selene's writings have been described as 'psychotic' in some quarters.

I feel sorry for her. She's a young person, and she'll be forever linked to those silly guilter screeds. I always thought she was being used and manipulated by Quennel or McCall, or others in the tabloid world connected to the Kerchers, and that whole PR effort, which is what it was.

I feel no need to respond to those silly arguments anymore. The cassation ruling made them all irrelevant.

Salon should have done Selene a favor, and not have published. Or made her wait a day or two, until there was time to reflect. Not that it would have helped, but it might have. Anyway, I'm done with all that.

Seriously, Selene Nelson is (and always was) a total and utter nobody in journalistic terms in regard to this case. The only reason that any of us have ever heard of her is that a number of people have their ears close to the ground to pick up all media commentary on the case.

She's absolutely not worth thinking about, let alone worrying about. It may or may not be that she has connections to the case, whether via Kercher's English uni friends or not, but at the end of the day it's irrelevant. All she ever was was a low-quality, highly-partisan hack with an agenda, who never got her copy published in anything more than the total backwaters of the printed media. She's nobody.

 

[LondonJohn]

Killers have walked before and will walk again.
Must be hard to take for the Kercher family.


I see some posters are wondering what to do now. The option of attacking the ‘guliters’, cops, witnesses etc and more importantly the victim’s family and the victim herself long into the future is always available.

Oh dear. Oh dear me. What have we here?

Projection abounds as platonov imagines that pro-acquittal/pro-innocence commentators are motivated by a desire to "attack the victim's family and the victim herself". Speaks volumes.

And predictably, he also opts for the "killers walk free" nonsense. Maybe he too, in time, will step away and consider that maybe there never was any credible, reliable evidence against Knox and Sollecito, that the prosecutors and the convicting courts were the ones that made the massive errors, and that it's the Supreme Court that has finally seen this case for exactly what it is. He might come to understand the significance of the SC opting to acquit outright rather than send the case back down for a further appeal trial. He might realise that the SC acquitted on the basis that "the acts (i.e. the acts of murder) did not exist" as they applied to Knox or Sollecito - that is to say that the court considers explicitly that neither Knox nor Sollecito participated in the murder. Not that they might have participated, but that the lower courts merely failed to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. Not that. They concluded that Knox and Sollecito did not particpate in the murder, full stop.

And maybe after that sort of reflection, he might come to the slow realisation that perhaps it was he who was wrong in his thinking about this case. On the other hand.............................................

 

[anglolawyer]

Anglo or other lawyers would know better, but I think Amanda would have a much stronger case in the UK for a slander claim.

But I agree that I doubt either Amanda or Raf wants to spend any more time in a courtroom. I think the novelty has worn off.

I am not overly familiar with the defamation laws of individual American States but from what I read it seems free speech is prized more highly over there than it is here. Amanda would encounter problems suing here, though. We have recently liberalised defamation law and made 'libel tourism' a bit harder too. I can't imagine that pursuing irrelevant, anonymous guilters will be high on her list of priorities. She is probably happily unaware of their pathetic activities. She surely has bigger fish to fry: getting her life back to normal and securing compensation from Italy are both much more important.

If the guilters' activities spill over into her real life and if she acquires the means and will to do so, she will be able to make an example of a few of them to discourage the others. Being ruined by litigation is not fun. Ask her family and Raffaele's. If I were a guilter I would be very careful.

 

[platonov]

I doubt it too, but for a reason that I doubt you will comprehend . She will want to move on and unlike in Italy defamation suits are very rarely filed.. (plaintiffs almost never win them here because the standards of proof . Also Amanda is considered a "public person" therefore, she would also have to not only prove that these people maligned her but they did it with malice. So, while I think that she could prove that they were wrong, she would have a difficult time proving the malice.

Nope.

The Guardian is HQ’d in Londonograd – the libel capital of the world.

She could have a field day.

 

[platonov]

Fractions.

Time for me too to thank the members who posted so much great information in these threads over the years. I rarely posted myself, and have only sporadically followed the thread (at least, since the more contentious earlier days when there was a lot more moderator involvement...) but over time, the truth became clear.

Here's how I'd sum up the case, for anyone who doesn't want to delve into those details but is open-minded about the overall picture.

There was and is no plausible accurate primary evidence against Knox. No crime scene evidence, no physical evidence on her person, no primary documentary evidence, no apparent motive, and no credible witnesses.

There was a lot of claimed evidence, but it wasn't evidence about the crime. It was all abstract, generated by the process itself. Claims about how she behaved while in custody. The scenarios that prosecutors and the press invented. Things people had said and written in other people's trials. The absence of exculpatory evidence that had vanished while under the control of the police. Things supposedly already "established" by earlier stages of the process.

The problem is, to sort out the two categories of claimed evidence, and see that overall pattern, one has to delve into the details. News articles almost invariably mix the two when describing "the evidence" and so could leave the impression that Knox was acquitted despite there still being some evidential "strikes" against her.

There are, in actual fact, none.

None, really?
Just as well you didn’t disclose this earlier in these threads – it would have put quite a crimp in the post count and reduced forum traffic.

However, the third guy charged with the murder openly accused them while on the stand in their 1st appeal – in an actual court.
Would that, for example, not count as a strike?

Or, at least, as 60% of a ‘strike’.

 

[LondonJohn]

I am not overly familiar with the defamation laws of individual American States but from what I read it seems free speech is prized more highly over there than it is here. Amanda would encounter problems suing here, though. We have recently liberalised defamation law and made 'libel tourism' a bit harder too. I can't imagine that pursuing irrelevant, anonymous guilters will be high on her list of priorities. She is probably happily unaware of their pathetic activities. She surely has bigger fish to fry: getting her life back to normal and securing compensation from Italy are both much more important.

If the guilters' activities spill over into her real life and if she acquires the means and will to do so, she will be able to make an example of a few of them to discourage the others. Being ruined by litigation is not fun. Ask her family and Raffaele's. If I were a guilter I would be very careful.

I agree with every aspect of this.

Knox and Sollecito have quite clearly won the public relations battle in the US (and also probably in the UK and Italy). I remember writing some while ago that in their positions, the whole thing hinged on whether or not they were ultimately legally exonerated - if they ended up definititely convicted, there would still be some public support (especially during any potential extradition battle for Knox), but I suspect a good number of semi-interested obsevers might shrug that there's no smoke without fire. On the other hand, acquittals - and especially the type of acquittals they received yesterday - would ensure they were viewed favourably by all except for a very small hard core of people whose voices would become increasingly drowned out and irrelevant anyway.

So they (Knox and Sollecito, and their families and friends) should now get on with living the sorts of lives they desire, and not waste any time worrying about the small cadre of damaged nutters who continue to try to vilify them online. As you say, if it ever crosses a line - especially if there's any attempt to harass Knox, Sollecito or their families - then the full weight of the law should be brought down upon those responsible.

 

[LondonJohn]

Nope.

The Guardian is HQ’d in Londonograd – the libel capital of the world.

She could have a field day.

You're not up to date with legal developments and legislative changes in England and Wales, are you.......?

 

[Samzilla]

None, really?
Just as well you didn’t disclose this earlier in these threads – it would have put quite a crimp in the post count and reduced forum traffic.

However, the third guy charged with the murder openly accused them while on the stand in their 1st appeal – in an actual court.
Would that, for example, not count as a strike?

Or, at least, as 60% of a ‘strike’.

And yet openly didn't accuse them on a skype call to a friend when he didn't think the police were listening.

 

[platonov]

It's been an education.

If the Kerchers lodged a claim against Italy with the ECHR for a violation of their, and Meredith's, rights under Article 2 of the Convention, for not conducting an effective investigation of a death, they would get to see the records of Guede's trials and interviews with police and prosecutors.

Note that Guede was not, insofar as known, subjected to the kind of high-pressure interrogation used on Amanda and Raffaele.

Nor apparently was PL – see uppage.
Who knew that Italian cops went so hard on rich Italian kids and purty American gals and so easy on black African immigrants.

The things one learns on this thread.

 

[acbytesla]

Anglo or other lawyers would know better, but I think Amanda would have a much stronger case in the UK for a slander claim.

But I agree that I doubt either Amanda or Raf wants to spend any more time in a courtroom. I think the novelty has worn off.

Also a lot of these losers don't have much..so they are in effect judgment proof.

 

[LondonJohn]

Also a lot of these losers don't have much..so they are in effect judgment proof.

They have laptops or tablets

And in the case of criminal harassment, they (presumably) have their liberty..........